Did Epstein Help Bring Down Theresa May For The Right?

0:00You know what I can really go for right now? Literally anything that comes in a McDonald's cotton, wrapper, or bag, or a McDonald's cup. Yes, any of those items you do it. We've got your cravings covered. Now, stop in for the flaky filet of fish, the crispy snack wrap, or a large fries for just $2.99. Limited time only, price and participation may vary, cannot be combined with any other offer. Welcome to Navarra Life, coming up tonight. More revelations from the Epstein files, and these ones beg the question, did Epstein conspire to bring down Theresa May? Should we be paying more or less taxes and what's the government policy recently affected public's opinion on that question? And also, Jim Ratcliffe called to apologise for saying the UK has, quote, colonised by immigrants. I'm Helena, aka No Justice MTG, and tonight, I'm joined by Daria Gabrielle, how are you doing?

1:01I'm doing all right. I mean, every time, I mean, for the past few weeks now, we've been covering this Epstein story. I've had to start really digging into these files, and I can't say that it's put me in the best mood, ever peeling the onion of this disgusting elite that apparently rules our world, but at least we get to tear it apart and really, I don't know, like, ground our conversation today. So that gives me a little bit of relief, at least. If you'd like to support our work, you can sign up at NavarraMediaq.com forward slash support, as always. And as always, you can also listen to the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts, and don't forget to let us know what you think in the comments below. Over the last two weeks, we've covered the links between the current Labour government and Geoffrey Epstein in depth. That connection passes, of course, through former US Ambassador Peter Mandelson.

2:01But new documents from the US Department of Justice's Epstein files suggest that previous governments may have had even closer links. So close, in fact, that it might even appear that Epstein was coordinating a coup in their favour. That was Boris Johnson back in July 2018, after he resigned as foreign secretary into resume's government over her soft Brexit proposal. He was the third minister to resign that day, in what would become a hemorrhage of hard Brexit days from her front bench over the following days. At the same time, former Breitbart News Chairman Steve Bannon was setting himself up in London, less than a year after he was sacked as adviser to US President Donald Trump in his first administration. By July 2018, Trump was urging,

3:03even threatening May to do a hard exit from the EU. On the 13th of that month, Bannon appeared on GMB with Pierce Morgan and Susanna Reed. It's a warning to reason. You know I'm better than most people. Is this a warning shot to Theresa May that if you go too soft on Brexit, we will not be able to do the deal. I don't think it's anything subtle. I think it's direct. I think you were saying, hey, we came here and I think he feels a little misled. And the fact that we're prepared to do a major free trade deal with you guys, and we've talked about it now for over a year and a half, and then they come and see that this is, I think, a softer Brexit than even anybody anticipating so. We know that Donald Trump puts America first. Yes. It's one of his slogans. Theresa May is in a very difficult position. This one of his beliefs is just a slogan. If she takes the gamble. Well, exactly. If she takes the gamble of cutting ties with the EU, on the basis of some future promise of a comprehensive trade deal with the United States, and actually he decides that's not in America's interests,

4:03she's stitched up. There's a very prescient comment from Reed there. But as you can see, Bannon was pushing for a hard Brexit. But was he perhaps pushing for more? Later that day, Epstein texts Bannon. This is from the latest DOJ upload. Having fun asked Epstein, and Bannon answers, we are overthrowing May right now. That counts, says Epstein. So you've got a former Trump advisor, and at that time, absolute loyalist, telling a billionaire child rapist and sex trafficker who appeared to have his fingers in every political pie that we quote unquote are overthrowing Theresa May. But who is the Wii here? Is it Bannon and Geoffrey Epstein? Or is Bannon referring to some other group? Epstein even boasted about Bannon's work to another but unidentified contact. Epstein tells his contact Steve Bannon and I are just laughing all day. The contact then asks for the latest from Bannon, and Epstein replies trying to overthrow the English government. The next day, Bannon makes a public announcement. In an interview with the telegraph,

5:04Bannon declared that the moment had come for the recently resigned Boris Johnson to challenge May for the top job. The next day, the 15th of July, Bannon is back on the airwaves. This time on LBC, where he's interviewed by another pretty big Brexit figure. Did Boris Johnson and you work together? You know Boris very well. Yeah, he came over immediately. Boris came over and the first, I think, a week or two to meet with Jared myself in Trump Tower. We spent a lot of time with him, got to know him over the last year. I've always been very impressed with Boris. Will Boris use the knife tomorrow? Will he stand up in the House of Commons in your opinion? I'm trying to get rid of this prime minister. It's a binary function. I mean, it's if he's to me, if he's to have a future and to be a leader, you got to go in there and say, hey, you know, I'm offering alternative whoever's with me is with me. If you go in and just give some sort of water down thing, I think the British people want bold action. They said that when they voted for Brexit. They understood the working people in the middle, and people in middle England,

6:04they understand it's all kind of complexity, it's all kind of details to the deal. What they wanted was very simple. They wanted out. They wanted their independence. Will Boris give them independence? We'll have to see. I got to have you look at his ladder. If you look at him and his writings, you look at his book on Churchill. He's a student of Churchill. I mean, this is the inflection point. This is a defining moment. Johnson didn't grasp that moment. Not then anyway. But he did, if the Epstein files are to be believed, hang out with Steve Bannon. This is also from the most recent upload of Epstein files. Where are you, asks Epstein on the 18th of July? London, with Boris, replies Bannon. And that exchange continues. Epstein says, dare to be great speech, and he appends a smiley face, laugh in my ass off replies Bannon, last night and in the press. Now, that appears to be a reference to this speech that Johnson gave in Parliament, just before 3pm on the 18th, one that seemed aimed at rallying a rebellion against Theresa May.

7:06We need to take one decision now before all others. And that is to believe in this country, and in what it can do. Because I can tell you, Mr Speaker, that the UK is in marries. And there are millions, if not billions, across the world. Are fully expecting us to do what we said and to take back control, and to be able to set new standards for technologies in which we excel, to behave not as rules takers, but as great independent actors on the world stage. And to do free trade deals, proper free trade deals for the benefit and the prosperity of the British people. That was the vision of Brexit that we fought for. That was the vision that the Prime Minister rightly described last year. That is the prize that is still attainable. There is time. And if the Prime Minister can fix that vision once again before us,

8:10then I believe she can deliver a great Brexit for Britain. Now, given Bannon is talking to Epstein at about 6.30pm UK time on that day that Johnson gave the speech, what does he mean by last night? Could it be that he's telling Epstein that he helped Johnson draft that speech? Now, we can't assert that, but the messages are certainly suggestive. As it happens, Theresa May managed to hang on for a few more months, despite growing discontent amongst her MPs and ministers. But that unhappiness came to the boil in November 2018. On the 9th of that month, Joe Johnson, that's Boris Johnson's brother, quits May's cabinet over Brexit. A week later on the 15th, seven ministers defected over Brexit. And guess who's back in town? Now, then, Steve Bannon, who has returned to the UK to give a speech at the Oxford Union on the 16th, Epstein messages him. On the 16th, Epstein messages him, and these are from an older uploader files in November last year. Bannon texts Epstein, saying, Hey, I have gotten pulled into the Brexit thing this morning with Nigel,

9:12Boris and Riesmog. Can I take a rain check on the fiat guy until a return? That's a reference to a meeting Epstein set up for Bannon in an earlier message, and Epstein gives Bannon permission to cancel it. The conversation continues. The guy says Bannon, presumably though we can't be sure for Johnson, for Raj and Riesmog, are trying to move on May today, slash tomorrow, and I'm having a meeting right now. Bannon goes on to say that the UK is a hot mess, with Epstein advising him, I think staying as long as you can is best, so people can get the commitment of your follow-through. Bannon agrees. Later that day, presumably after the meeting referred to earlier, Epstein texts Bannon again. Will Theresa May survive, he asks? Ignore the first Bannon reply, that's about a question, he asked Epstein a little earlier, but in reply to the May question, Bannon says, I don't see how, but the guys over here have no balls. Exactly my fear says Epstein, pencil neck and all, to which Bannon replies Boris, Gove, Riesmog, David Davis,

10:12somebody has to step up. There is no challenge to me's leadership, despite the cabinet resignations, but less than a month later, on the 12th December 2018, Theresa May faces a confidence vote of her MPs and survives. A month later in January 2019, and she survives another confidence vote, though narrowly, it would have taken just 10 more MPs voting against her to have her knocked out, but on the 23rd of May that year may resigned. And on that same day, Epstein messages Bannon, saying Theresa May resigns, good work. Bannon replies, may down, Merkel and Macron on Monday, to which Epstein says, yep, and Modi on board. That's a reference to India's right wing populist prime minister, Narendra Modi, by the way, who had won a second term that very day. Dahlia, lots of questions to ask here, lots of interesting detail that we now know about this period, which has been studied so much in British political history. What does it say about all of these links between these specific people?

11:13As we have been seeing more and more coming from these Epstein files, I think for a lot of us, it's really put us in quite a strange position. And the question that I have had to ask myself is, has my theory of how power operates in the world? Does it explain the things that we are seeing? Because I've always made a very key, I've always tried to make a very key point that when we talk about power, we're talking about something that is structural. We're not talking about this kind of conspiratorial, four or five men in a shadowy room, deciding how the world is run. And it becomes really difficult when you read these files to not think, oh my god, was it that the whole time? And you feel like some of the most cracked pop conspiratorialists are being sort of proved right with every new release of files. But what I would say is that,

12:14is I do think that what we are seeing here is not that kind of shadowy cabal, but what we are seeing is kind of the workings of a particular faction of the ruling class, this kind of very court-protest faction of the ruling class, who are organizing or trying to out-organize another faction of the ruling class, the one represented by, I guess, the kind of Theresa Mays of the world. And as much as, you know, Bannon and his cronies like to claim that they are anti-establishment and what they are doing is in the name of an anti-establishment politics, they are actually very firmly within establishment interests. They're just duking it out within the establishment of who holds the power and exactly how that power operates. And the faction that we are seeing being organized here, through and alongside Jeffrey Epstein, is that that hard-right anti-immigration

13:14sort of doge style creative destruction. I would argue neo-ugenicist nihilistic faction of politics that we are your heavily nativist faction of politics, that we have seen gain a lot of ground. Over the past five years, especially five to ten years, I would say. And that has been sold to us as a kind of organic populist moment. And what we can actually see is that there's nothing organic. There's nothing populist about the rise of that politics. It is an organized form of politics that has involved key stakeholders that include very, very powerful billionaires, tech owners, as well as the political figures that might be the more front-facing part of that faction. And they have exploited the fallout from the 2008 financial crisis, the long tail of the 2008 financial crisis,

14:17and the failure of the more centrist elements of the establishment to really speak to that fallout and that crisis. And it seems like, you know, like Epstein was a key among so many other things, was a really key power broker of that particular faction. And it helps us explain a little bit why a man like Epstein would be so invested in Brexit. Because what I would say is that it can be quite difficult to decipher, you know, what is the ideological world view of this man who it seems brokered so much power and has been doing so for so long. You know, we don't get many insights into Epstein's actual political ideology and view of the world that he was trying to materialize through these various networks and through and alongside the abuse of children. And, you know, because this is a man who is friends with,

15:19with Nome Chomsky, is friends with Peter Teal, is friends with Bill Clinton, is friends with Steve Bannon, Donald Trump. And it's like, what is the overarching ideological framework that this man was actually invested in? And I think that the one of the few emails where we really do see it is in some of the ways in which he's talked about Brexit and in some of these interactions that we can see here. And he describes, you know, when Brexit happened, he emails Peter Teal and he says Brexit is just the beginning. And Peter Teal says the beginning of what? And he says the return to tribalism, the counter to globalization, and amazing new alliances. So those are the things that he says. And that gives us one of the few insights, I think, into his world view. And what that ideology and world view of Epstein and the men that he, the very powerful men that he appears from these emails was very close to and kind of co conspired with,

16:21not necessarily in the sex trafficking itself, but in the reorganization of the political order. It is this world view that is so deeply invested in a hierarchy of human life. You know, it is a belief that, and this is a through line that runs throughout these kind of political machinations that we see in these files right through to the sexual violence and abuse of children. And, you know, the children were subjected to at the hands of Epstein. And it is this new eugenicist belief that human life, you know, the global population exists in categories, powerful and powerless. Those categories exist on a hierarchy. And the powerful have power because they are better, because they are inherently better. They are a superior race of humans.

17:23They are smarter, they are more entitled, and they should have the right to subject lesser people to whatever kind of violation and degradation and dispossession that they see fit. And that operates at multiple scales. And it is the unifying theme of this world that we are getting an insight to in the Epstein files. It runs from, you know, Galen Maxwell saying that the girls that she allegedly trafficked for Epstein and his powerful friends, you know, one of the survivors says that she literally referred to these young girls as trash by which she means, you know, these are girls who are from the wrong side of Florida. They are, you know, working class. Their poor, many of them had experienced already experienced a form of a physical or sexual abuse in their lifetime. And, you know, their non-starters, they're written off. What good could they serve other than being toys for the super elites?

18:23That's almost like their kind of their born function. And it runs from that right to this celebration of this return to nativism that we see through his alliance with someone like Steve Bannon, which again is rooted in this idea, not only that there should be a very small powerful elite of people, but also that there are some groups of people, i.e. white European citizens who exist at the top of the hierarchy and that the rest of the world should be shut out from any resources that are seen to be theirs, and that they essentially exist to do, to serve that very particular group of people. And so, and we also see it in Jeffrey Epstein's, you know, obsession with his DNA and with eugenics and with create, you know, social, like, like genetically engineering the population in his vision

19:24of that hierarchy of human life. So what we, what I get from when I, when I see this particular alliance between Bannon, Boris Johnson, Modi, this kind of new right wing that has almost inexplicably gained so much power politically, financially, economically over the past five to 10 years, it is an essentially near eugenicist view of the world that runs through from the way he viewed the young children that he trafficked right to the vision that he had for national, for politics on a global and a national scale. And I don't think we can underestimate how important that world view of these individuals and their ability to wield their technological and political and financial influence to bring about that world view. And that is, we are seeing the materialization

20:24of that power brokering through the rise of far right populism and nativism. And so it just kind of affirms to me that this rise of this particular kind of right wing politics was not this organic natural or inevitable populist expression. But it was quite an explicitly engineered exploitation of a crisis, the financial crisis, which exposed many of the failures of the status quo but is shifting us towards a status quo that is actually in many ways a retrenchment of some of the worst things about a centrist neoliberal politics. Now it's worth pointing out, Dalia, that Bannon continued his friendship with Jeffrey Epstein until very shortly before the billionaire's death. Not only that, but Bannon was working with Epstein to rebuild his image very shortly before the billionaire's arrest on charges relating to sex trafficking and sexual abuse of hundreds of girls.

21:24That's despite the fact that Bannon later frequently criticised Epstein to his followers. Bannon and Epstein were so cosy, that Bannon even appeared to lay out a plan in 2019. We need to work around your 38. First we need to push back on the lies, then crush the pido-trafficking narrative, then rebuild your image as a philanthropist. Now it's worth pointing out that we don't know about any of what people knew about Bannon's links to Epstein in 2018 when all this Theresa May stuff was going on. We don't know what the links were between the group of people Bannon was liaising with, and whether or not they knew about his conversations with Epstein at the time. But given the fact that they are still so close, even at the point at which he's wanting to potentially work with Epstein to change his image privately. And the current fallout that we're seeing at the moment with regards to the current government in this country

22:25being criticised for political appointments and political friendships that go as far as linking people to Jeffrey Epstein. There are some questions that need to be asked, there are plenty of questions that need to be asked, about what these people knew at the time, now that we know all the information around how close Bannon is and still is to the British right wing in this country, given that he was, it seems integral, if these messages are to be believed, to plots or ways in which the people were looking at overthrowing centre-right governments across Europe and replacing them with far right ones. Dario, what are all your thoughts on this? Yeah, I mean, it is completely fascinating. And in many ways, I think that, you know, the Donald Trumps, the Steve Bannons, the Nigel forages of the world really painted themselves and like, back themselves into a corner and into a really difficult dilemma

23:26that I think they probably always knew was kind of coming and we're going to maybe cross that bridge when it came to it, but it was that so much of the mega-ground swell was articulated around this idea of drain the swamp, you know, lock her up and around these ideas of the elite being involved in this kind of sex trafficking network, which then they then link to, you know, things like immigration and all of these things. It kind of becomes this cipher for the deviance of the elite and how Donald Trump and Steve Bannon and all of these people were coming into smash that. And I wonder what it was like for them for this whole time to see mega, you know, the ground swell around mega to be so centered around these kinds of narratives of drain the swamp corruption and Epstein being a big part of that imaginary

24:27to be playing with that fire, knowing all along that they were embedded in that in a really concrete way because in a way, the fact that the mega populism, Epstein had this really big kind of position within the imaginary of the mega politics. You know, mega versus Epstein was kind of the way in which many mega voters saw themselves. And then it turns out that the guy that they elected on the basis of their horror at Epstein and their beliefs around how Epstein reflects a broader story about the way that power works. And then to find out that the guy that they elected was more embedded than anyone it seems with those networks and was part of those networks and was part of that world view. That is almost that kind of contradiction and irony

25:29is almost a metaphor for the broader kind of the broader fabrication that is right wing populism in this moment, which is that the very things that they have run on, the anti-establishment, the, you know, we're going after the corruption, we're going after this, that, and the other. And it turning out that the call was coming from inside the house the whole time. I do wonder if, and this can go one of two ways, either it can completely break down that mega voting coalition and kind of break that spell, that ban and Trump forage, et cetera. It actually articulate an anti-establishment moment and feeling that is very real and is very rooted in people's real feelings and real observations. Will this moment break that spell or will Trump and ban and et cetera be able to successfully as they so often have divert attention

26:30away from that and say, okay, actually, no, the point never was, Epstein, the point was this, that, and the other. Or is the fact that it turns out that the reality was so different to the way in which the story had been sold to so many mega voters, will that either split that reality or will it be something that they are able to, to kind of narrativeize their way out of? And I think what I would like to see as a kind of deeper investigation into how people who were Trump voters, who are diehard Trump voters, what they think and how they respond, how their worldview may or may not have changed, as a result of realising that their guy was also, it seems, Epstein's guy. Now, one thing, there's probably not going to help the mega movement's image, is the fact that there's Epstein files with a subject of a US congressional hearing on Wednesday with Attorney General Pam Bondi called to give evidence. Bondi is ultimately in charge of the release

27:30of the files by the Department of Justice and she's been criticised by victims and politicians for the way she's handled it. Critics argue that powerful figures are still being protected, given that at least 2.5 million documents are still unreleased, while many of those that are on the internet have been heavily redacted. The department also failed initially to conceal the names of many victims of Epstein's sex trafficking and rape ring. And Congress did not hold back. This was the Democratic Party representative Chui Garcia. Attorney General Bondi, glad you finally made it here after hiding for four months from this committee. I understand. Wow, I thought you were hiding from us. You're one of the worst attorney generals in our history and an instrument of Donald Trump's lawless authoritarian agenda and I'm glad the American people are seeing who you are, how you act and the lack of good values. You weaponise the Department of Justice of Target Immigrants, working families and anyone that Trump deems an enemy of the state

28:31all to protect real powerful criminals, including in your administration. Democratic colleagues have focused on your cover-up of the Epstein files and your passion for protecting pedophiles and child traffickers. There were other conflicts like this one with Ted Liu. There is no evidence that Donald Trump has committed a crime everyone knows that. This has been the most transparent presidency. He's the one who asked for those files. I mean, claim my time. I got your answer. You said it's no evidence. I like the legislation. This is the long time. I'm belongs to the gentleman from California. I'm going to put up another document from a witness who called the FBI's National Threat Operations Center because I believe you just lied under oath. There is ample evidence in the Epstein file. Don't you ever accuse me of a crime? I believe you just lied under oath. And this is all a videotape. You said there's no evidence or crime.

29:31I'm showing you. Here is a witness statement who called into the FBI's Threat Operations Center. He drove Donald Trump around in a limo. He overheard Donald Trump said to Jeffrey on his cell phone. He was so angry he was going to stop a limo and hurt Donald Trump. And he met a girl who said she was raped by Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein. She later had her head blown off and officers at the scene said that could not have been suicide. No one, no one, at the point of justice, interviewed this witness. You need to interview this witness immediately. Epstein should write in hell social the men who patronize his operation. And as we say here today, there are over 1,000 sex trafficking victims and you have not held a single man accountable shame on you. If you had any decency, you would resign right after this hearing conclude. I mean, is it difficult to disagree?

30:31Sorry, at this point, the fact that they've not even bothered trying to haul anybody at this point in front of any amount of accountability for featuring in all of these DOJ releases is absolutely crazy. There's huge amounts of documentation now about people who are implicated at least some more at least for questioning in terms of their relationship to Jeffrey Epstein and they've not bothered wanting to get anybody held accountable at all. One of the most striking moments was this one, prompted by Premilla Jaipalm. To the survivors in the room. If you are willing, please stand. And if you are willing, please raise your hands if you have still not been able to meet with this department of justice. Please know for the record that every single survivor has raised their hand. It's just pickable.

31:31I mean, it's an image. There's a great image of all of them holding their hands out with pan body, not even bothering to pay any mind or even look at them at the time. An image that I think will come to haunt the Trump administration and be alongside the image of members of the public, civilians and their lifeless corpses having been murdered by ice, as representative of the attitude of the Trump administration, total lack of concern for anyone other than their own. Bondi, for her part, wasn't afraid of taking some very low blows. This was her response to questioning from Democrat Becca Ballant. Also, I want the record to reflect that, you know, with this anti-Semitic culture right now, she voted against a resolution contempt condemning. Oh, really? I just want to be clear. Do you want to go there, Attorney General? Or do you want to go there? Are you serious? Talking about anti-Semitism to a woman who lost her grandfather in the Holocaust. I mean, Dahlia, what much can you even say?

32:34What can you even say about this kind of interaction and the standard that is being expected of one of the most kind of powerful people in America in terms of Pam Bondi as the head of the DOJ? The thing to remember about Pam Bondi is that Pam Bondi doesn't care what you think. Pam Bondi doesn't care what I think. She doesn't care what the survivors of Epstein think. She doesn't even really care what voters think. She has one member of the audience that she is performing for. And that is Donald Trump. And we need to remember why Pam Bondi is in the position that she is in. What qualifies her for the position of being Trump's Attorney General is the fact that she has got a track record of manipulating the law and manipulating justice systems to protect powerful men, including Donald Trump himself.

33:35Not only is this someone who has been a die-hard Trump loyalist since 2016, but their relationship actually goes further back than that. When she was Attorney General in Florida, she actually was the primary reason why a lawsuit against Donald Trump's Trump University, the reason that that lawsuit got dropped, which happened after Trump made a what turned out to be illegal, $25,000 donation to her PAC. We go back again to the fact that she was Attorney General in Florida. She took over as Attorney General from Florida after Alexa Costa. Alexa Costa was Trump's first Labor Secretary, who was well known for designing the sweetheart deal that basically saw Epstein evade federal sex trafficking charges, where he ended up in jail for a year on nothing but procuring sex workers.

34:43And he ended up in jail for a year, where he was able to basically leave the jail and conduct business as normal and go as and when he pleases, a sweetheart deal that is basically unprecedented within the justice system. Now, Pam Bondi herself did not, there's not responsible for that sweetheart deal, but she followed in Alexa Costa's footsteps as Attorney General in Florida and did nothing to rectify that. It's very difficult for me to believe that Pam Bondi would not have been aware that these charges had been brought up against Epstein, and she would have had access to much of the information that led to this kind of sweetheart deal. Maybe not all of it and maybe, you know, expecting her to intervene in an investigation that had already been closed might be a little far, but what we can say is that she was mired in a culture of cover-ups and of aiding and protecting the reputations of powerful men.

35:44And that is what she is doing right now. Her job in this hearing is not to answer the questions of democratically elected officials who are there to hold her accountable. It's not there to restore some segment of dignity to the survivors who have been failed time and time again, despite showing now that we know the scale of this operation and the deaths and the fact that people lost their lives becoming too close to exposing what was going on, the immense bravery of those women who were young girls when this all happened to them. She is not there to face any of these people. She's not there to face us. She is there to show Donald Trump that she is able to do what he has recruited her to do, which is to divert attention from his implication and the implication of others like him in the networks of power that have been exposed by the Epstein files.

36:45And she does that by what? By shouting, by yelling, by making the story, you know, her behavior by insulting the people that are questioning her by making the story something other than the complicity of herself and the complicity of the people that she serves in the failure of Epstein's victims. And so when we understand that is who Pam Bondy's audience is, that's where her bread is buttered and has always been buttered, we can understand a little bit why she has exhibited such frankly bizarre behavior during these congressional hearings. And again, my interest is in how does, how do diehard mega voters respond to seeing that? Given that Epstein and, you know, the idea of this network of power who were involved in sex trafficking children, that was so central and such a motivating factor for many of them to vote for Donald Trump, how do they respond seeing his second-hand woman,

37:48his right-hand woman, essentially, you know, showing that she is there not to actually answer these questions despite having these files and having the capacity to do so, but is there to actually protect a man who has been named over and over again in these files as at least someone who is inappropriately related to a man like Epstein given the fact that it was an open secret, essentially, what he was up to? I think that we are, as I say, starting to see the mega-based kind of peel away, especially young men where the support for Trump is created, it's created almost immediately. People who were pretty ensuing with the Epstein file discourse because they can have the podcast sphere that brought these people into the mega movement, especially during the last election cycle. And there's a moment, I watched Thomas Massey being interviewed by journalists in the United States, and he claimed this would be bigger than Watergate. That was his claim. This will be bigger than Watergate.

38:48I think that he's right. I think that he's right. And there's a lot of fubus in the Trump administration and a lot of the Pambondis pushback was like, oh, look, the Dow Jones is doing really well. People's retirement savings funds are doing well, while you are asking about the Epstein files, just totally deflecting. And something is incredibly serious of a scandal as a child's sex trafficking ring that implicates huge numbers of powerful people with seemingly no ability for the Trump administration to hold any of these people accountable for the crimes that they could potentially have committed. People don't just overlook that. People aren't going to be diverted away from this. And the more and more and more that they try and deflect, as Pambondi continually did for five hours or something during these congressional hearings, will only serve to detach more of these people who've been sold this huge long string, this ball of string that they've been following from day one of the kind of Epstein stuff being popular discourse, to now that we're pouring over the files from what we've seen that's been released because of the Epstein File Transparency Act

39:50is causing a lot of these mega faithful to lose faith because as we have seen Trump's new political term and office has been terrible and for them specifically too. Should we be paying more or less tax? This is a question that seemingly only has one answer. As tax is always something we like somebody else to pay. It's a big problem for the Labour government too. They were elected on a pretty contradictory platform of ruling out major tax rises whilst also promising better public services. And so they had to essentially resort to sub-diffuse to justify increasing taxes by around 40 million pounds in their first budget. In the run up to the election, the Institute for Physical Studies accused both the Labour and Conservative parties of engaging in a, quote, conspiracy of silence as both parties manifestos did not account for real terms cuts to unprotected departments of around 18 billion pounds. Labour's line in the run up to the election was that their manifesto pledges didn't require tax rises other than the small increases that they had trailed during the election. This was even called out to Darren Jones,

40:51who is Shadow Secretary at the time, by Novara's own Ashaka. When it comes to the Labour manifesto, there's a lot that you're not saying. What you're not saying is what you're going to do about the planned 10 billion to 20 billion pounds worth of cuts, which were already announced in the March budget. Will they be going ahead? Will they not be going ahead? Your tax and spend plans are tiny. Now, what I think you guys are going to do? You don't want any headlines which say Labour are going to raise tax. What you're waiting to do is maybe pull some rabbits out of the hut, maybe do some reforms to capital gains, maybe you're going to fiddle around with the Bank of England rules, because lots of your plans, for example, are going to go around retaining staff in the school system or retaining staff in the NHS. That's going to cost you money. And you know that, and I know that, what the manifesto's job is, is to get you over the line for the election. It's not actually a plan for government. You might say it's smart politics, but it's fundamentally dishonest with the country. It's very funny watching Darren Jones shake his head, as Ashtradamus there proved to be totally correct

41:51about what was happening, like she was absolutely right. And Black Hole and the nation's finances and fiddled around with capital gains taxes to justify their budget's tax increases. This damaging of public trust isn't just bad for political disillusionment. It's also bad for those of us, like myself, for example, who do think that tackers are too low. It's a decision that has dramatically polarised public opinion in its wake. On Tuesday, the National Centre for Social Research published its most recent social attitude survey, and Polster Luke Trill from Moren Common has found a pretty sharp change in the opinion lurking in the data. Further striking evidence of the thermostatic reaction against higher taxes from the British social attitude survey out today, number backing higher taxes for higher health spending drops to 36%, while the number supporting reductions in taxes and spending hits a record high. Similar on welfare spending, matches what we increasingly heard in focus groups over the past year. Scent system isn't awarding contribution enough, but also notable as they highlight a particular decline in numbers,

42:51saying pensions should be priority for more spending on benefits. Which is interesting to me, because I think that taxes are probably still too low. If you look at taxation as a percentage of GDP, it's still lower in this country than kind of similar countries in Europe that have similar economies to ours and that have bigger public spending and have the kind of social welfare states have the kind of public services that people in this country say that they want. They say they want to have the kind of top tier public services that you will get on the continent. And yet, whenever we see tax rises, because again, this is the kind of the first big set of tax rises that we've seen since 2010, that's immediately negatively polarised people towards the concept of being able to create. What we see Rachel Reeves kind of trying and failing to do, which is a new social contract where we say, look, people will pay a little bit more in tax, businesses may pay a bit more, but you'll get a return in public services. The issue, of course, is that there was no buy-in. There was no democratic buy-in for these tax rises.

43:52People who have been sold a prospectus for government that did not come to fruition and have seen something else that's been put in in its place, a bunch of tax rises with which she did not get a mandate from the public to deliver because they were not in the manifesto to begin with people rightfully feel conned. And the fact that that has negatively polarised people towards what in my mind is a pretty small amount of tax rises, I think we could be looking at more tax rises on wealth, for example, and more tax rises in equalised in capital gains with income tax. And I think, yes, plenty of people who pay pay Hawaii could stand to pay a little bit more too, similar to the fact that people on terms of income tax in Nordic countries, things that are economies that work much better than ours do, also pay more in tax as well. And what they've done with this, they've also at the same time run about how they need to reduce the welfare state by cutting things like the limited capability for work-related activity benefit, that disabled people need to claim and people within capacity need to claim.

44:53And they have created, they've manufactured consent for more cuts to welfare because they've said that it's necessary. They've taught the public that it's necessary, whilst saying to people, well, we only had to raise these taxes once and we didn't want to do it, but we had to do it, even though we didn't ask the public whether they would accept that in the first place and they run up to the election. And that's damage. That's damage public trust and politics, but it's damage the social democratic kind of consensus that they're trying to build, as I said before, which if we actually wanted to see a better economy in this country, if we wanted to have better public services, if we wanted to be able to bring more public services into public ownership, we would want those taxes to go up as well to be able to afford a kind of welfare state, but we better. That is now going to be increasingly impossible to sell to the public of Rachel Reeves' subterfusion deception, because of Morgan McSweeney's desire to sell labour to a bunch of middle-class middle-Englander types who didn't want to pay any more tax by restricting labour in terms of what taxes that they could potentially raise

45:54at the budget as well, or, indeed, they could have raised in the manifesto, meaning that what have we sold all of that public goodwill that previously existed as we see from those statistics towards a potential increase in spending? Very little. We've seen some increases in NHS spending granted. I'm glad that they're there, we're seeing wasting lists come down. We've not seen substantial increases in the welfare state other than the two child cap being removed, which they were pushed into doing so by losing votes to the green party, precious little else, precious little else in terms of what they could actually use additional tax revenue for to be able to improve public services and, indeed, potentially improve the welfare state or cancel, for example, some level of student debt or make student loans less punishing and, instead, they've done the opposite because they haven't bothered touching things like the triple lock as well. This is such a big damage that she's done by not actually having honest perspectives for government and long-term, we're going to see what we've seen in the polls recently, which is Kimmy Bayknock being preferred

46:55as Prime Minister to every other political candidate because she's running on a platform of saying we need to cut taxes and we need to cut taxes by cutting welfare. That's the kind of politics that's now being engendered by the subterfuge of Rachel Reeves. And I think this is going to have long-lasting consequences for people who want to push left when politics in this country. Dalia, do you think my assessment is correct or do you think that we can still win the public over? I mean, I think you're completely right in the sense that ever since, you know, Blairism, we have seen a refusal from the British Labour Party to really fight the political war. And one of these political wars is regarding, you know, the long tail of saturism and neoliberalism, which is when this political narrative around taxes really began, because, you know, it was, it is that neoliberal ideology of low taxes, low welfare services,

47:57a small public sector that has been unanimously accepted across the mainstream British politics, and we have yet to see, other than maybe Corbinism, a mainstream political vehicle within the UK to really fight that argument, because I really do believe that it is not an inherent, I don't think that people inherently and always will be against taxes. When you look at actually the things that people, you ask people point blank, do you want to pay more taxes? Of course, most people are going to say, no, I don't want to pay more taxes. And a big reason for that is because people have a really stark sense that the taxes that they pay do not go to the things that they actually care about. You know, if your taxes, it's the same way with us, Helena, you know, we're not pro-taxes regardless of what those taxes are being spent on. I too resent the fact that, you know, I am paying taxes

48:58that aren't going into housing people, that aren't going into our education system, that isn't really going into improving our NHS, but actually a significant amount of that tax money is being used to service, you know, 10, 15-year-long PFI contracts that are actually doing the exact opposite and are turning our public services into profit-making opportunity, or money-making opportunities for, you know, crony capitalists. I too resent high taxes in that context, whereas if there was a sense of two things, first of all, that taxes that are raised are actually going directly on the public services and the public sector that we care about, education, health care, infrastructure, all of these things that routinely in polling, people believe should be part, fully part of the public sector and should not be being privatised through the back door, and second of all, that taxes are being paid,

49:58according to your ability to pay them. What do I mean by that? I mean that people who are on, you know, moderately middle class or even upper middle class incomes are not having to put a significant amount of the tax bill at the same time as people who have passive wealth in sources, people who have a amount of wealth that could not possibly spend in their lifetime, in their children's lifetime, in their grandchildren's lifetime, is being left untouched when we know that a 2% annual tax of wealth over 10 million pounds could basically pretty much almost completely close that NHS funding gap. It becomes very difficult then to hear that, you know, ordinary working people should be putting that tax bill. But this is all a product. This kind of, this perversion of our understanding of what taxes and what the potential of a good tax system could be,

51:02and this sort of immediate knee-jerk consensus that any tax equals bad, that any government that wants to, any party that wants to get into government has to run on low taxes. The way we pierce that is by having a really honest conversation about who should be paying that tax and who is not currently paying that tax because they have the ability to manipulate our tax system to basically invade those taxes, and also to have an honest conversation about what those taxes are being spent on. The problem is that these taxes are being used to service contracts that enrich the broader networks of our politicians rather than being put directly into the services that will improve our lives. Because as you say, Helena, all the things that we know people want, which is a better state education system, a better, you know, publicly funded, publicly owned NHS,

52:02more social housing, better quality social housing. These are all things that you cannot get to without taxes. Where the frustration actually lies is in the design and the power distribution of that tax system. It's not with tax themselves, but unfortunately, we have not seen yet, other than Corbin, really, a Labour Party politician, a Labour Party leader who has been willing to take on that story and willing to take on that narrative. Instead, they're trying to kind of get there through the back door or to manipulate the kind of the books in a way that means that they technically aren't raising taxes, or they technically might not be raising taxes, but in reality, every day working people are having to either see that materialised through a decline in their public services or a real-terms tax increase. When really the frustration is not with the idea of a tax system,

53:03it's with the idea of the fact that our tax system right now doesn't service the things we wanted to service and it's also not being fairly distributed amongst the powerful. This is all a product of the fact that the political elite in this country refused to tackle the elephant in the room, which is that once you get past a particular level of wealth, which is a level of wealth that you and I will never see in our lifetime and will probably never even know people who have access to that level of wealth, are able to pay their way out of paying their fair share of tax. And that is actually where the struggle and where the problem lies. It's not in taxes themselves. Multibody and Air Jim Ratcliffe is the CEO of Petrochemical Company Ineos, but is most known for being a minority shareholder in Manchester United FC. But yesterday, for some reason, yet to be deciphered by us here at Navarro Media, Sky News decided to give him a platform and he shared his thoughts on immigration and welfare. And what he said was, of course, quite a step.

54:04If you really want to deal with the major issues of immigration with people opting to take benefits rather than working for a living, if you want to deal with that, then you're going to have to do some things which are unpopular and show some courage. Has this government done that? No, I don't know whether... I don't know whether it's just the apparatus that hasn't allowed Kia to do it or maybe too nice. I mean, I know Kia is a nice man, I like him. But it's a tough job. And I think you have to do some difficult things with the UK to get it back on track because at the moment, I don't think the economy is in a good... You can't afford... You can't have an economy with 9 million people on benefits and huge levels of immigrants coming in. I mean, the UK has been colonised. It's costing too much money. It will cause... It'll cause... The UK has been colonised by immigrants, really, isn't it?

55:06I mean, the population of the UK is 58 million in 2020. No, it's 70 million. That's 12 million. Now, it's worth pointing out that it's just wrong here. We haven't seen a population increase of 12 million. It's been close to 3 million as our population was around 67 million in 2020 and not 58 million. There's quite a different number to Ratcliffe's assertion there. But it's the language around colonisation that's been picked up on, however. Going as far as the desk of the Prime Minister himself. Offensive and wrong. Britain is a proud, tolerant and diverse country. Jim Ratcliffe should apologise, Keir Starmer says. That's not very island of strangers now, is it, Keir? And given that the government's hawkish migration policy is tailored specifically to woo reform curious voters for Raj's left to Ratcliffe's defence. Britain has undergone unprecedented mass immigration that has changed the character of many areas in our country. Labour may try to ignore that, but reform won't. So who's in the right?

56:06On BBC's News Night, the question was put to Times columnist, Tory Convert and former England table tennis number one, Matthew Saird. On immigration, I don't like the language. I think that's unfortunate. We've not been colonised in any meaningful sense. But where I agree with the thrust of what he's saying is not so much for me about economics, but democracy. People did not vote for this size of influx into the country. The Conservatives consistently said they would cut immigration to the tens of thousands. It's spiked to levels that are completely unprecedented in the history of this country. It's had very dramatic impacts on people's access to housing, pressure on infrastructure. That I think goes to the heart of the collapse in trust in British politics. There are other dimensions to it, but I think that is fundamental. Now, I'll respond to his comments around infrastructure and housing later on, but it's worth pointing out he isn't wrong in terms of the democratic deficit here. Not just Tory governments, but Labour oppositions

57:07and many other opposition parties have all run on low immigration. It's clearly been the uniting position that many members of the country not only vote for, but care deeply about. When you look at the Brexit referendum, there's more evidence of the fact that there was a large section of people who wanted to vote for Brexit, because they thought it would reduce immigration. I think that that was probably incorrect as we saw it increase even after Brexit. Anyway, but regardless, that was the state of play in the political mind of the country at the time, and they were let down by government after government, although there probably were reasons why they still allow that migration to happen, which will become clear when we've moved into the next comments, as Syed was then asked about Ratcliffe's comments on the welfare state specifically. The welfare system has gone out of control, particularly sickness benefits. This is at a time when we desperately need to spend on defence and have spent years, if not decades, relying on American military power, effectively free riding on the shoulders. I particularly think the blue collar workers in America

58:07who have funded our military expenditure, and so we do have to cut it back. Most of the benefits are obviously pensions, aren't they? It's about 13 million pensioners. But at the same time, we have a debt to GDP ratio of 100% and rising, and because we have an ageing population, that could explode to 300% by 2060. I know this is statistics, but it is absolutely fundamental to our predicament. If we had built infrastructure, energy, houses, then we maybe could have coped with some immigrants. But to have such an influx whilst not being able to deliver the infrastructure that could accommodate them was a disaster in two different dimensions. Now, there are two really big pieces of cognitive distance going on here. The first of all is him saying, well, if we just invested in infrastructure and energy and housing, then we'd have been able to accommodate the increase in population, which again, isn't wrong. This guy's just joined the Conservative Party, did a whole press conference about how he was joining the Conservative Party, who was in government not building those things.

59:07It was the Conservative Party, and what makes that even worse? They were not building these things. They were not investing in infrastructure when interest rates were 0%. We were in a liquidity trap. When no one was investing despite rock bottom interest rates from 2010, all the way up to 2019 when the Conservative Party was in power, doing the same kind of fiscal conservatism that he is now supporting, having joined the Conservative Party. As part of his speech, he was talking about fiscal profligacy on behalf of the current administration. I'm just like, you're literally advocating for the kind of investment. Now that the party that you have joined was totally a reticent in building throughout the entirety of the time you're criticising their migration policy. It was basically free money at 0% interest rates in terms of public investment to build council housing, to build energy, to build infrastructure, and they were cutting these things in terms of capital spend and day-to-day spend. David Cameron said, cut the green crap. And now he's backing the same kind of austerity politics.

1:00:07The second piece of cognitive dissonance here, going back to, of course, about the increasing pension bill that will be coming down the line, has always going to leave us with 300% debt to GDP ratio. And I'm like, well, yeah, we have an aging population. What do you think a really easy way of fixing this is, Matthew? How about lots of people who are of working age moving to the country to be able to support the fact that our population pyramid in this country is incredibly top-heavy? And these are people that the state doesn't have to pay to educate. And yet, he's out here going, yo, we should curb this migration even further and make our aging population problem even worse, and make the productive capacity of the economy, which is necessary to be able to support those pension bills even lower. It's a totally nonsensical position. Now, luckily for newsnight viewers, Novara's own Ashaka was on hand to bring the conversation back down to reality. I think Jim Ratcliffe is a stinking hypocrite. He became a tax resident of Monaco. That's 4 billion pounds that could have gone towards British schools.

1:01:08The British NHS could have gone towards British defence. Instead, he decided he wanted that money for his own pockets. Secondly, if it wasn't for immigration, I think that man United would have had about three of their starting 11 last night. So, copy, minor, Luke Shaw and Harry Maguire. Not really going to beat West Ham with that, are you? And the kind of language of being colonized by immigrants. That moved beyond talking about immigration as a policy, which are more for, which talk about every area of policy. You're talking about people, and you're talking about people who've come here to live, to work, to have families, as though there are hostile occupying force, taking away your language, your culture, your ability to survive. We know there are some voters who do believe that the language is being taken away, that their culture is being taken away. Where's the language being taken away? Yes, there are some people who believe the means made of cheese, but it doesn't mean they're right. In terms of culture being taken away, I'll tell you what's done it. It's the fact that we imported American style consumerism,

1:02:10and there are so many things which are wonderful and unique about English culture, which got knocked down to make way for car parks and dual carriageways. 100% agree, 100% agree, de-yankification. Now, it's all, it's all a girl can ask for. And again, it's true, like the real kind of cultural vandalism that we've seen is the replacement of actual local and British, whether they be from migrant or from British backgrounds or from, I guess, from existing British citizens, backgrounds, building business in this country that's created a kind of a tapestry of what our country looks like today. And I am all for this. The way you vandalize that is replacing it with identical soulless American corporate chains. You take a culture that's been here for thousands of years, that's been enriched by people coming here, making a life and building their own existence in this country and bringing their culture with them and having cultural exchange with the existing people who live here, that gets bulldozed over by the latest American chain coming and bulldozing through it, as I said before.

1:03:11This is kind of esoteric, but one of my favorite things about this country is because we have been so continuitous in terms of the way in which that our country has existed for so long, and that there's been like regional accents, for example, of stock for century after century. And people come here from other countries, they'll move here and they'll bring up, they'll set up a life here. For example, there's a very famous kind of Bosnian refugee, post a lot on Twitter on TikTok, he's an MB, and he moved during the Bosnian refugee crisis to Newcastle, and he's got this Bosnian Newcastle accent, and that's such a uniquely British thing. Does that happen when American megacorporations buy our high streets? That kind of thing doesn't happen. It's such a uniquely British part of what our culture is given us. The previous example that you just can't have the same thing when it comes to the domination of the amplification that we've seen over the last kind of 30 years or so, Daliya, what's your take? Two things. First of all, these anti-immigrant millionaires and billionaires are not against freedom of movement.

1:04:13We need to be really clear about that. They are against freedom of movement for regular people, because the world that these people occupy is completely borderless. They have free reign to move themselves and their money as they please. God forbid you questioned their right to do so. Ash was completely right to bring up the fact that Jim Ratcliffe changed his tax residency to Monaco in order to not pay British rates of tax. That just goes to show that you can make a bunch of money running an English football club paid for by English football fans. But when the money actually is meant to be put back into that system, you decide to fence it off and move it and build up a tax residency in a country that realistically lets not be delusional here. You have no ties to other than your desire to take advantage

1:05:15of their tax system. If they want to live, if the super rich, who are running these media corporations, telling us that immigrants are ruining the country or who want to go on the media and say these kinds of things, if they want to move either where their money is, where their assets are, where they live, if they want to move for any reason, whether it's protecting their wealth or even if it's just because they like the food and the lifestyle somewhere, they believe they have a right to do that. And if you say, well, I actually don't think that you should have a right to move your money to a different tax jurisdiction from where you're making it, just because you don't want to pay taxes back into the system from which you made that money. Oh my gosh, they'll call you jealous. They'll say, you know, this is the envy of the poor. They'll say that you're curbing their freedom. But if you want to move country because the country where you live in

1:06:15and the conditions where you exist, make it untenable for you to support you and your family, a condition which, by the way, is part of the long tail of actual colonization, not the imagined colonization that Jim Ratcliffe is conjuring up, then you will be called a scrounger, just because you want to make a living that can sustain you and your family and you want to live a dignified life while doing it. And another thing to remember as well is that a lot of these anti-immigration billionaires and millionaires benefit a huge amount from immigration. Whether we're talking about an oil company, this is an oil executive. If you think the oil industry could survive without migrant labor and I'm talking globally here, not just within Britain, but if you think the oil industry could survive without migrant labor, you are sorely, sorely mistaken. So a lot of these super rich people would not have made their fortune

1:07:16without the work of migrant labor. What they want is that migrant labor to exist without any rights or pathway to any kind of settlement or citizenship. And that is the world that is envisioned by the Nigel Farages and all of them and these kind, this kind of milieu of people. It's a world in which we get all of the benefits of migrant labor globally, but those migrant workers don't have actual full human rights and citizenship and pathways to settlement and dignity. And so, and even if we think about the way in which it's articulated within this country, you know, as you mentioned, Helena, the aging population, the fact that this country cannot survive without the productive capacity of migrant labor. That is not a question. That is actually not up for debate because it's pure and simple maths, right? The only thing that is actually up for debate is,

1:08:17do we treat those migrants like human beings when they're here? That's the only question. That's the point at which we're disagreeing on. And when it comes to the question of colonization, I just want to bring this up as well, because I do find it so deeply ironic. You know, this is where that really useful phrase of every accusation is a confession. You know, the Nigel Farages of the world will, you know, fly their union jacket, sing rule Britannia and then talk about how immigrants are colonizing Britain or how immigrants are coming here and they're taking the language, they're taking over the culture, they're taking our resources. And it's like, you are just projecting, because that is exactly what your ancestors did. And that is exactly the world view that you buy into. You, the belief that it is the right of white Europeans, white wealthy Europeans, to have free range over the world, to redesign political, legal, civil systems,

1:09:19to kill off indigenous languages, to kill off indigenous cultural practices. That's your bag, that's not our bag. And that's the great irony of both these kind of imperial nostalgia, these people who traffic in a lot of imperial nostalgia, whilst also engaging in this moral panic about immigrants taking over Britain, it comes in handy once again. Every accusation is simply a confession with this law. Two thirds of monogask residents are tax exiles from other countries, right? Like, it's quite literally a colony of billionaires and formula one drivers. As you say, every accusation of confession. Now Jim Ratcliffe is not just controversial for his political views. His short tenure so far as a United shareholder has not been without controversy either. To find out more, I spoke to football documentarian Alfie Potzheimer of the YouTube channel HITC7s about it earlier today.

1:10:19I began by asking him for a quick reaction to Ratcliffe's comments from yesterday. I didn't agree with them. It would be my first takeaway. I think it's not particularly surprising that a sort of tax dodging Brexit support in billionaire has some right leanings in his views of the world. I don't think that would come as a surprise to anyone. But the choice of language, which seems so pointed and which even I double down or whether the interviewer was sort of audibly a gasp or shot that he used in terms of colonized, which is, I think, is a word that you actually see quite specifically on very unusual far right from the changes online. I don't think that's like a particularly mainstream word to use about immigration colonized. I think that was quite surprising to see some one of his, I don't know, profile.

1:11:22I don't think it's particularly mainstream language that you tend to see use. So yeah, that was not great and not ideal. Yeah, certainly. Given the fact that a lot of conservative kind of commentators have said, they don't agree with the language, but there's a point to be made. And all of the people to the right of that are the ones who've agreed with the language, I think, as a pretty fair assessment. But of course, one of the kind of the main things that you've done in your own content is criticise Jim Ratcliffe's management of Manchester United Football Club. And there's a couple of angles to this in which there's been lots of criticism levied to his direction. Let's start off with the kind of the financial side. Of course, he's now a minority shareholder in Manchester United and he's now in charge of the data running of the club. What's been the financial impact of that given the fact that he's, obviously, a multi-billionaire with certain class interests? Well, so technically, I would say he's actually not the majority owner. He's the minority owner. The Glazer's still own most of the club. So he owns just shy of like 30% of Manchester United.

1:12:25I mean, it's like 28.9% or something like that. But as part of him coming in, I think basically the cost of acquiring Manchester United would be quite steep even for Jim Ratcliffe, despite the fact that he is or was Britain, the wealthiest Brit, which is an interesting enough itself. So the Glazer's still own most of the club, who are the Americans that bought the club in the mid 2000s. Jim Ratcliffe, though, as part of even though he's a minority owner, he actually controls the football operations. The reason being the Glazer's hate are broadly despised and they wanted to basically offload blame. Well, either it could go either way. If it goes well, that's good for them, because they have a huge financial interest in the club doing well. They owe most of the club. If the football side of things went badly, Jim Ratcliffe would be the full guy instead of them, because he's now the one calling the shots.

1:13:27Basically, on the football side of things, things have gone very badly, because many United finish third in the season before Ratcliffe came in. I mean, they've been in a sort of downward spiral as anyone who follows football, even vaguely, although ever since Alex Ferguson retired. But in the last two years, since Ratcliffe's been there, they've finished eighth and fifteenth. Many United finishing fifteenth is like just unheard of. That hasn't gone very well. He slashed free lunches for staff. I think he said that he never got a free lunch in his line of work. He cut charitable donations, so there was like a charity that Man United had that would support players that played for them. Maybe in the 60s or 70s, before there was a lot of money in football, which is like well-locumented things like dementia and all sorts among footballers, especially from yesterday. They just got rid of that completely. And then when he was interviewed by Gary Devil, they said, couldn't you have just done like,

1:14:28because these are tiny amounts of money, some of these things. I think that was like 40 or 50,000 pounds. Obviously, in the context of Manchester United, a tiny amount of money. And Gary Neville put it to him that, couldn't you have just done like one, you know, Gala or dinner with some of the players and have raised the money that you've slashed from these former players? And he said, oh, well, no one suggested that to me. No one said that at the time. I probably don't. So yeah, he doesn't always seem like the most with it, even just in terms of basic competence from that perspective. I've been made aware that he also bought his share in the club through a leveraged bio, which essentially means that a lot of this revenue is coming from the club itself rather than from him anyway. And on top of this, there was a story I did hear about the potential for there to be a new stadium. I think that was going on the background. So I was not some public funding potentially involved in that. Yeah, so I think the plans are still going ahead

1:15:29with the new stadium money. The rumor is that it'll cost two billion pounds. And yeah, he basically wanted the he said that his argument was that there's Wembley in the south of England in London, which is obviously a centrally funded project. And that the north should have a Wembley. The difference there obviously is that Wembley is the national team stadium, that the FA basically enter operates. And Manchester United are a private company that would profit from a stadium being built for them. They generate enormous revenue in their own right. So it was. I think that was shut down fairly quickly that idea. But yeah, it does show a sort of supreme arrogance that he left the country. Well, he relocated in EOS back in 2010 to avoid paying corporate taxes at the UK.

1:16:29Then he relocated himself or redormous out himself in Montenegro in 2020 to avoid paying personal tax in the UK. But felt that taxpayers who asked the UK should front up and ask that he would then apply. So I think maybe there's a degree of arrogance and delusion there. We were saying there was no such thing as a free lunch. Was there justification for cutting those free lunches for the staff at United itself? But apparently there is, in his mind, potentially a free lunch on offer if it's for funding for a stadium for him. To be in, as you say, a part owner of. And again, as you also correctly pointed out, he's very happy to move his businesses and his own personal finances abroad and then ridicule others for coming to this country and describing them as potentially colonizers in the language that he used on Sky News the other day. Although it's interesting he's a Brexit supporter, which is probably why he was very happy to see,

1:17:30you know, it's not in Europe anymore, which is quite funny. Specifically though, in terms of how he's viewed by the fans. Because of course the glazer buyout of United was kind of viscerally despised by a lot of United fans. Has that, has his new ownership stakes in 2024 given him the same kind of response from the fans? So I should clarify that I'm not an United fan just to be absolutely clear. But I think the way it goes in football by and large much as I would like this not to be the case is if you do well, the owner tends to be relatively popular. If you do badly, they tend not to be. So in the case of Man City, obviously, they're owned by the UAE effectively, technically they're owned by Shakeman sort of, but really long into that. But if Man United had been really successful, I think a lot of this stuff about sacking low-paid staff, cutting lunches, charity, et cetera, et cetera, these things would have been most fans would probably.

1:18:33But obviously there would be exceptions people who were more engaged in these things, and more socially minded would think it was bad. Of course, what relic of studies has had the combination of being deeply dislikable and the team being terrible. So yeah, I would say he's fairly unpopular. There's probably, there wasn't really a great, the options at the time for Man United were either a full take over it's seen by the Qataris, or this part take over by Jim Ratcliffe. Obviously both were dubious in different ways. They ended up with the Ratcliffe route, which probably was from a football perspective, and you can take your pick from a moral perspective by the neither of them seeing that, especially a directive on that front. Come back tomorrow for another live stream from 6pm. For now, you've been watching Novara Media. Good night. Thank you.